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Between science and religion

HOW far does 'up' go?
The ancients imagined a blue pastel shaded dome illuminated by the sun. If you continued to go up, you would collide with the ceiling. Crash. The upper limit of the universe.
The Presocratic philosophers replaced the ancient creation myths with reasoned theoria. Things don't always have to be the way they appear. Maybe there is more to the universe than our tiny world. Maybe the Earth isn't flat. It could be round, if...
— A remarkable breakthrough.
Then Plato and Aristotle conceived of a different way of 'describing the world' which came to be known as metaphysics.
There is something to say about the world, the cosmos, beyond mere 'theory'. About what it is to be — anything at all. About the nature of Being with a capital 'B'. The nature of existence.
Their answer to the ultimate question about the nature of existence was Form.
As to the source of 'Form' or the 'Form giver', that remained a matter of speculation — or contemplation. Plato calls it the Form of 'the Good' (Republic). Aristotle proposed an 'Unmoved Mover' (Metaphysics).
Two and a half thousand years later, we are still more or less in the same place as the Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle. You can theorize about 'the world' or 'the universe' (science, physics) or you can contemplate the ultimate source of all worldly things (spirituality, religion).
For one who is in pursuit of the question 'what what is is', both are unsatisfactory. 'Nothing flickered or went fuzzy... it is as if before everything was up
and now everything is down.'
(The Metaphysics of Meaning)

'The world is and will always be something absolutely other than I. It
is not mine to take for granted.'
(Naive Metaphysics)

It's something you have to see and feel. You have to see things 'as if' they were upside down, you have to see 'the world' in its worldhood as something separate, something other than 'I' or 'my world'.
— You have to feel the presence of the 'elephant in the room' (Philosophizer).
The world isn't a thing. The 'worldhood of the world' isn't the nature of that thing. The world in its worldhood is more like a state of mind, or something you mentally connect to. Somehow.
Belief, faith, fantasy — they all amount to the same thing. Pictures in the head (Stirner, Wittgenstein). We create images in our brains and then we fetishize them — as scientific 'theories' or religious 'beliefs'.
The fetishism of belief.
Why are human beings so concerned to find something to believe? It is as if belief allows you to possess the world, or a chunk of it at any rate. Belief makes you the owner of Being. When you [think you] have the right theory, or when you [think you] know that the world exists because God created it, the world itself ceases to be 'other'. You own it.
Then again, how can we be sure that Being is 'other'? Why must it be?
'The only thing that is really real is the Question. One cannot think, calculate or analyze the Question. One can only see and feel it.'
... These words are not the right words, but they had to be put down anyway. As a marker. 'Insert the right words here.'
Right words? There are no right words!
'Well, evidently, what I see is something rather than nothing, otherwise why are all these words coming out?'
— We've heard that one before!
There's a problem. We'll grant you that. The very fact that you 'think you see something' is a question, whether you actually 'see' anything or not.
What else can one do but tell a story? Either the story makes sense or it doesn't make sense. Either the story has the 'ring of truth' or not.
What else indeed! Like the movies 'The Matrix', or 'Dark City', or 'Truman's World', it's all just more of the same. Mundane ('of the world'). Every story is mundane.
The answer to the Question cannot be a story. Anything that has any resemblance to a story or theory is something other than the thing we are really after. Is. Existence. Or 'what what is is'.
Why go after it? With such fervour? Where did the idea come from that there is something to pursue? — It doesn't matter where. An account of 'how we got the idea' would just be another story, another theory.
— Then let's see how this plays out...